Exhibiting: Bridget Farmer, Kathy Landvogt, Catherine Pilgrim, Jane Rusden
Venue: T3 foyer, 36 Wellington St, Collingwood
Dates: 3 November 2025 – 31 January, 2026
This exhibition brings together four artists from Central Victoria whose practices honour the natural environment through close observation, patience and care. Each work is an act of attention – a deliberate slowing down to notice what is often overlooked – and, in that way, becomes a gesture of respect. The artists invite us to see the land, its species and its waterways not as backdrops but as living presences.
As we think about this, it’s worth remembering the words of Georgia O’Keeffe – the American modernist painter who gained international recognition for her depictions of natural forms, particularly magnified flowers and desert-inspired landscapes drawn from the places she lived. O’Keeffe once reflected:
“Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
Her insight resonates with the practices shown here. Each of these artists takes the time to look, learn, and translate their encounters with the natural world into marks, textures and forms that ask us, too, to pause and pay attention.
Catherine Pilgrim’s drawings and lithographs from her Mrs Larritt series revisit Bendigo’s colonial histories through the overlooked domestic realm. Richard Larritt, the government surveyor who laid out Bendigo’s city grid, is well recorded, but little is said of his wife Maggie who made a home and cared for the family. Pilgrim’s work draws attention to these silenced narratives by merging the rigid geometry of colonial maps and surveying with delicate depictions of native plants. In this way, she unsettles the gendered and colonial hierarchies embedded in official histories. For Pilgrim, drawing itself becomes a form of care: the sustained attention it requires is both an act of respect for her subjects and a way of slowing down to truly see them. Echoing Georgia O’Keeffe’s reminder that “to see takes time” Pilgrim’s practice suggests that contemplation and careful looking can reshape how we understand the past and connect with the present.
Jane Rusden brings a naturalist’s patience to her delicate watercolours of birds. Works such as Weebill foraging in Yellow Gum, Hooded Robin, Bimblebox Nature Reserve and Jacky Winter, Bimblebox Nature Reserve show not just species but specific moments of foraging, resting and flight. Her paintings speak of presence rather than possession, and are a quiet celebration of the resilience still present in our landscapes.
Bridget Farmer’s — Peaceful Doves, Red Wattlebird from Chiltern and her monoprint Black Cockatoo — combine drypoint and monoprint techniques to capture fleeting moments of avian life. Drypoint is itself an act of patience: scoring fine lines into a plate, inking, wiping, pressing. This rhythm of repetition parallels the cycles of flight, feeding and migration that she depicts. Her birds seem poised between presence and disappearance,
Finally, Kathy Landvogt creates delicate sculptural works that respond to the waterways of Central Victoria. Living on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, she acknowledges this as land she does not culturally own, and approaches it with humility and care. Her practice seeks to strengthen a sense of belonging by learning about Country while also questioning colonial frameworks. Through the slow, repetitive processes of shaping wire, stitching and wrapping, Landvogt reimagines waterways as fragile yet resilient forms, offering them as symbols of connection, responsibility, and hope for healing.
Together, these artists propose a different pace of seeing and knowing – a way of belonging that is not ownership but relationship. Like O’Keeffe’s magnified flowers, they remind us that attention is an act of care, and that to see takes time.
Jenny Port, Curator
